What are you talking about? (What was this in his head?)
~ You would not believe what I am, commandant, but what I am talking about is a thing called genocide, and the proof thereof.
We did what had to be done!
~ Thank you, we’ve just been through all that. Your self-justifications have been noted.
I believed in what I did!
~ I know. You had the residual decency to question it occasionally, but in the end you did indeed believe in what you were doing. That is not an excuse, but it is a point.
Who are you? What gives you the right to crawl inside my brains?
~ My name would be something like Grey Area in your language. What gives me the right to crawl inside your brains, as you put it, is the same thing that gave you the right to do what you did to those you murdered; power. Superior power. Vastly superior power, in my case. However, I have been called away and I have to leave you now, but I shall return in a few months and I’ll be continuing my investigations then. There are still enough of you left to construct a more… triangulated case.
What? he thought, trying to open his eyes.
~ Commandant, there is nothing worse I can wish upon you than to be what you already are, but you might care to reflect upon this while I’m gone:
Instantly, he was back in the dream.
He fell through the bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood; he fell down through it to light, and the desert, and the rail line through the sands; he fell into one of the trains, into one of the trucks and was there with his broken leg amongst the stinking dead and the moaning living, jammed in between the excrement-covered bodies with the weeping sores and the buzz of the flies and the white-hot rage of the thirst inside him.
He died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony. There was time for the briefest of glimpses of his room in the retirement complex. Even in his still-shocked, pain-maddened state he had the time and the presence of mind to think that while it felt as though a day at least must have passed while he had been submerged in the torture-dream nevertheless everything in the bedroom looked just as it had earlier. Then he was dragged under again.
He awoke entombed inside the glacier, dying of cold. He had been shot in the head but it had only paralysed him. Another endless agony.
He had a second impression of the retirement home; still the sunlight was at the same angle. He had not imagined it was possible to feel so much pain, not in such a time, not in a life-time, not in a hundred lifetimes. He found there was just time to flex his body and move a finger’s width across the bed before the dream resumed.
Then he was in the hold of a ship, crammed in with thousands of other people in the darkness, surrounded again by stink and filth and screams and pain. He was already half dead two days later when the sea valves opened and those still left alive began to drown.
The cleaner found the old retired commandant twisted into a ball a little way short of the apartment’s door the next morning. His hearts had given out.
The expression on his face was such that the retirement-home warden almost fainted and had to sit down quickly, but the doctor declared the end had probably been quick.
V
[tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28.858.8893]
xGCU Grey Area
oGSV Honest Mistake
There. I am on my way.
oo
xGSV Honest Mistake
oGCU Grey Area
Not before time.
oo
There was work to be done.
oo
More animal brains to be delved into?
oo
History to be unearthed. Truth to be discovered.
oo
I would have thought that one of the last places one would have expected to find on any itinerary concerning the search for truth would be inside the minds of mere animals.
oo
When the mere animals concerned have orchestrated one of the most successful and total expungings of both a significant part of their own species and every physical record regarding that act of genocide, one has remarkably little choice.
oo
I’m sure no one would deny your application does you credit.
oo
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker.
oo
Absolutely.
Well, let me wish you all the best with whatever it is our friends might require of you.
oo
Thank you.
My aim is to please…
oo
(End signal file.)
VI
He left a trail of weaponry and the liquefied remains of gambling chips. The two heavy micro rifles clattered to the absorber mat just outside the airlock door and the cloak fell just beyond them. The guns glinted in the soft light reflecting off gleaming wooden panels. The mercury gambling chips in his jacket pocket, exposed to the human-ambient heat of the module’s interior, promptly melted. He felt the change happen, and stopped, mystified, to stare into his pockets. He shrugged, then turned his pockets inside out and let the mercury splash onto the mat. He yawned and walked on. Funny the module hadn’t greeted him.
The pistols bounced on the carpeted floor of the hall and lay beading with frost. He left the short jacket hanging on a piece of sculpture in the hall. He yawned again. It was not far off the time of habitat dawn. Very much time for bed. He rolled down the tops of the knee-boots and kicked them both down the corridor leading to the swimming pool.
He was pulling down his trousers as he entered the module’s main social area, shuffling forward bent over and holding on to the wall as he cursed the garments and tried to kick them off without falling over.
There was somebody there. He stopped and stared.
It looked very much like his favourite uncle was sitting in one of the lounge’s best seats.
Genar-Hofoen stood upright and swayed, staring through numerous blinks.
‘Uncle Tishlin?’ he said, squinting at the apparition. He leant on an antique cabinet and finally hauled his trousers off.
The figure – tall, white-maned and with a light smile playing on its craggily severe face – stood up and adjusted its long formal jacket. ‘Just a pretend version, Byr,’ the voice rumbled. The hologram put its head back and fixed him with a measuring, questioning look. ‘They really do want you to do this thing for them, boy.’
Genar-Hofoen scratched his head and muttered something to the suit. It began to peel off around him.
‘Will you tell me what the hell it actually is, Uncle?’ he asked, stepping out of the gelfield and taking a deep breath of module air, more to annoy the suit than because the air tasted better. The suit gathered itself up into a head-sized ball and floated wordlessly away to clean itself.
The hologram of his uncle breathed out slowly and crossed its arms in a way Genar-Hofoen remembered from his early childhood.
‘Put simply, Byr,’ the image said, ‘they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman.’
Genar-Hofoen stood there, quite naked, still swaying, still blinking.
‘Oh,’ he said, after a while.
2. Not Invented Here
Hup!… and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem… Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That’s funny. View’s a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that’s a bad sign. Don’t feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here… Clock running way slow, like it’s down amongst the electronics crap… Run full system check.
… Oh, good grief!
The drone drifted through the darkness of interstellar space. It really was alone. Profoundly, even frighteningly alone. It picked through the debris that had been its power, sensory and weapon systems, appalled at the wasteland it was discovering within itself. The drone felt weird. It knew who it was – it was Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, a type D4 military drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Flench – but its real-time memories only began from the instant it had woken up here, a zillion klicks from anywhere, slap bang in the middle of nothing with the shit kicked out of it. What a mess! Who had done this? What had happened to it? Where were its memories? Where was its mind-state?
Actually it suspected it knew. It was functioning on the middle level of its five stepped mind-modes; the electronic.
Below lay an atomechanical complex and beneath that a biochemical brain. In theory the routes to both lay open; in practice both were compromised. The atomechanical mind wasn’t responding correctly to the system-state signals it was receiving, and the biochemical brain was simply a mush; either the drone had been doing some hard manoeuvring recently or it had been clobbered by something. It felt like dumping the whole biochemical unit into space now but it knew the cellular soup its final back-up mind-substrate had turned into might come in handy for something.